Reflections on Jordan - Mohit Dubey

Oberlin guitarist Mohit Dubey had a lot of thoughts about our Winter Term trip to Jordan upon returning back to Oberlin.

As I sit and slowly sip my cup of green tea mixed with rose and cinnamon purchased at the market in downtown Amman (where volume generated by the shopkeepers) correlates to number of customers attracted), I use my prayer beads to try to count the number of times someone has said something along the lines of “oh you were in Jordan, how was that?” in the past few days. Wow, what a question… where to start?

Next to me, in the first drawer of my desk, sits a copy of the Holy Qur’an with both the English and anglicized Arabic translation (purchased in the back of a tiny shop at the same market), on my shelf are cups of bits of pottery (Roman and Byzantine) that I scraped from the dirt in Um Qais and mosaic fragments dug up on Mt. Nebo (where Moses saw the holy land and then died), the three tiered telescope I bartered for at the crossroads in Jerash, which is holding up a polished sphere of stone carved from the walls of Petra, one of the seven wonders of the world. If I showed you all these treasures, that would only begin to tell you about the few days we spent exploring and relaxing as tourists – but nothing of the seemingly countless days of incredible interactions and experiences I had playing music with friends and for friends and for the sake of friendship in a totally foreign world. In thinking about how to get across all the power in those moments, I imagined interviewing myself, forcing me to find the challenging questions first before answering them. So that is what this is. However, what I might say as a quip to that question above, then, are six cliché words about the trip: historically educational, musically empowering, and personally transformative. Stick around to see why…

The author performing at Zata'ari Camp with Questscope

what did you go to Jordan expecting?

Good place to start, I’d say. I had many expectations about Jordan, but not too many. I expected winter warmth (mostly true), mosques (a lot more densely packed and louder than I imagined), and delicious hummus, pita, and shwarma (ohhhhhhhhmyyyyygooodddddyeesssss). But beyond that, I tried not to have too many expectations. In my previous travel experience, I have found it helpful to just enter with an open and eager mind, and spend the first few days excitedly trying to figure out and adapt to as much as I can: the language (I may sound like an idiot in Arabic but I don’t care), the daily rituals (call to prayer at 5:30 a.m. = alarm clock), and general customs (men may kiss your cheeks but be careful about shaking a woman’s hand). These things I felt I picked up quickly, and had no problem because I didn’t really expect them to be a certain way. I just tried to fit myself into the groove of Jordanian life.

what were some moments that stood out in Jordan?

Hmmmm… there are quite a few, and I may go in a weird chronology so bear with me.

One would be: arriving at the High Place of Sacrifice in Petra to the sounds of a flute above me, scaling a staircase while responding melodically on my ocarina, finding an old Bedouin woman named Tuba sitting there selling rocks, sitting with her daughter and drinking tea, then leaving with an unexpected big old kiss on the lips… That small set of moments gave me a small window into the life of these Bedouin who all once lived (some still do) in the caves and canyons of Petra, which have been inhabited for over 3,000 years. I will not forget the music of the flute, the taste of the tea (minty and sweet), or the surprise of that kiss.

At Petra

At Petra

Oooh: driving back from Jerash (largest and best preserved ancient Roman city [take that Pompeii]) sitting in the front seat with our driver Abdullah (who always called me sufi) watching the big red sunset. Earlier that day he had told me his life story: born in a tent in Kuwait in 1968, his mother was pregnant with him when she fled Palestine, once (and always) Bedouins (at heart, he remarked when we passed the scent of goats), they landed in Amman, he studied engineering in Germany, but no jobs so he runs historical tours instead. I started to tell him things about cosmology (I study physics at Oberlin). The Big Bang. “That’s in the Qu’ran”. Gravity. “That is too”. The eventual heat death of the universe in a billion cooled off black holes in a near-flat space-time. “101:5 and the mountains will be like carded wool”. We sat and smiled in silence, staring into the setting sun.

Jerash

Jerash

Another: driving into Za’atari (a newly built Syrian refugee camp about an hour north of Amman) and seeing birds flying through the sky thinking to myself “wow, I’m like a bird, I can fly wherever I like, passport paper wings” then turning to see the smiling kids playing in the streets. Later that day, closing our concert, I played a Turkish piece called “Koyunbaba” but spontaneously started off instead with a Syrian folk song “Hal Asmar Al Lan” that I had learned from oud player Tareq Jundi just a few days before – people humming along and smiling. The sound of home. Home in sound? We then snacked on little pizza-like pita yum-yums for lunch. The taste of home. Home in taste? I spoke to a poet who lived there (also a painter) and asked him to recite his work to me. He looked me hard in the eye, smiling, almost singing in his swaying Arabic. “What was that one about?” “Home”.

what did you go to za’atari expecting?

I think I was expecting a lot of different things in going to Za’atari and was going in with a lot of misguided information and interpretations. This is mostly my own fault, as I could have easily done some research and read up on the history of the camp and the reasons behind the current huge Syrian influx, but you know… yeah. So I went in thinking: there are all these people here, fleeing from some form of violence (all I had heard about from mainstream media was ISIS), and now they are stuck in Jordan until it all “gets sorted out”. I had no idea about the complexity of the whole situation or its historical and political roots.

But what I was thinking about a lot was “in what ways can music be empowering to these people who have lost their homeland, hopefully temporally”. Both my parents themselves are immigrants, Indian father and German mother, and, at least to some degree, I have seen Ravi Shankar and Beethoven connect them respectively to their homelands. Funny enough, while I was packing for this trip, I was listening to Beethoven’s Ninth and when the choir comes in at the end for the famous moment (ode to joy), my mother burst into loud German song across the room. So, I started thinking about how music is an experience, in a way, of how home stays inside of us and travels with us. Makes me think of the early tribes of Israel carrying around the tabernacle…

Another thing I thought a lot about was related to that word “empower”. This came from a Skype session we had with George Matthew, the founder of Music For Life International who had recently brought chamber music to Za’atari. Something he said really stuck with me, it was along the lines of: “When you walk into the camp, you exude power. You smell like it. Your passport, your freedom to travel wherever you want, to go home. That is an immense power that you wear. We want to find out how can music help bring the people with less power forward, and, inevitably, push those with power back. I want you to think about how you can be needy.” This was mind-blowing to me, I thought about it everyday. How can I be needy? What does that mean? I had recently done a workshop on “nonviolent communication” (developed in Detroit, you can Google it) which talks a lot about how stress arises when fundamental human needs (all humans included) are not met. I realized that while some people at Za’atari may have more urgent needs for subsistence (sustenance, health) and autonomy (freedom, self-efficacy), we all have shared needs for transcendence (meaning, beauty, creativity) and community (to be heard, appreciation) that music can provide. By connecting with that need, I felt like I prepared myself for anything in store at Za’atari and tried not to over think it too much.

Panoramic of Amman from the Roman Citadel

what did you learn from your experience at Za’atari?

Wow… so many things.

I guess, first off, I learned that the entire conception of “refugee” as portrayed in the popular Western media is very incorrect and dehumanizing. I am Facebook friends with refugees, I sang Wiz Khalifa with refugees, I talked about jazz and history with refugees. Many of them were college students like myself whose country just happened to erupt into civil war due to forces beyond their influence. This is sad. But it is sadder to me that much of their experience often just gets concatenated into one word: “refugee”. There is a pair of eyes and a life behind every single number added to create the ones broadcasted on TV screens…

Secondly, before arriving at the camp, I got a crash course on the origins and consequences of the current crisis and how it is entangled with Middle Eastern and international politics. I don’t know if I want to delve into it too much here, but understanding that president Bashar al-Assad has been persecuting the majority of his own people, splitting the country into a civil war partially supported by the United States and partially supported by Russia (the Kurds), who are simultaneously fighting the growth of ISIS into an Islamic State. The numbers are astounding… So far, over six and a half million Syrians have left home, about 600,00 of which are now in Jordan, either in Za’atari, another more recent camp, or living in urban areas. The Jordanian government, having dealt with refugee crises in the past, has become a safe haven for many people fleeing violence around the Arab world, providing protection and the hope of a new life. But, as I learned, the competitive interests of refuges from many places can cause trouble. About a month before we arrived, Sudanese refugees protested outside the UNHCR headquarters in Amman, claiming that they had been neglecting them in favor of incoming Syrian refugees. The issue of deportation also seems to still be a very tricky and terrible thing… What I learned here is that one’s homeland and one’s identity are intertwined (I am American, Amriki) and to live in a land where “home” is always in dispute is very intricately emotionally, socially, politically and psychologically complicated. I feel strongly for these people. I’m gonna quote a translation of a poem by the librarian at the Questscope center in Za’atari (thanks to Amal Ghulam):

“what is the homeland?

the homeland is the earth

and the lover/beloved

and the turquoise (or the singer*)”

*Fairouz literally means turquoise

On the balcony at our hotel in Amman

what did you learn about the role of music in Jordanian culture?

Music has many roles in Jordanian culture, many seem to overlap with those I’ve lived in the U.S. and experienced in other cultures (like those of my parents), but many were strikingly different. Moreover, music is treated very differently in different parts of Jordan based on the historical, cultural, and religious perspectives of the majority of people living there.  In the northern capital city of Amman, we could go out and see live Arabic music in hookah bars or dance to club music at the Holiday Inn if we wanted to, but just four hours south, music was thought of in a completely different way. We actually did go visit the south, to see the ancient city of Petra (I still feel like it was all a dream), and I had another musical-cultural shock: hanging with Bedouins.  Here, where people roamed the canyons by camel and slept in caves, music was essential. I sang with people in “Café’s at the end of the Earth”, played flute with people perched upon cliffs peeking into Egypt and Israel, and even had a jam session with a hip Bedouin guy IN THE ANCIENT MONASTERY (covered with “do not enter” signs [but remember it was his before those signs were there]). Even funnier was the way that many of these people (especially the kiddos) tried to trade anything they could for my ocarina, including a donkey ride up the mountain (I always had to decline). These different worlds felt so differently about music, and I learned from them all.

Professor Tareq Jundi of the University of Jordan instructs Oberlin students

A funny thing happened when we played at the University of Madaba, which was our first show. After the show, we had a q & a session with the students, mostly about our age, in a “music appreciation” class (they were mostly engineering students). They were mostly too shy to talk, so Terrence called out one kid in the back and asked him what he liked to listen to. His response was pure gold: “I don’t like music”. Ahahahahaha, the whole crowd was in uproar. But even better… T’Errence probed, “What do you listen to in your car in the morning?” “Nothing”, he says, to the great shock of an elderly gentleman in the room who immediately cried out “NOT EVEN FAIROUZ!?” Every morning, every one (I guess of a dying generation) wakes up and listens to Fairouz. It’s just a thing that happens. Isn’t that just magical? Everyone, falling in love with the same sounds over and over again each morning. I’ve been doing it here since I got back, and wow, waking up for class is a lot easier…

Finally, I think I learned the most about the similar roles music play in Jordan and the US after our performance at the American Language Center. This was a place where Jordanians in Amman can go to practice speaking English and take classes in English. They were nice enough to host us for multiple events, including a very well attended concert that ended with a question and answer session. Immediately the older crowd started questioning the viability of music as a career while the younger people started defending the importance of music – a similar struggle I have faced in convincing my parents to let me pursue music. We played for kids at three different school and the question of “can music really be a career” came up everywhere. I’m starting to wonder if musicians are making a stable living anywhere in the world. But one thing was for certain, music played a role in so many people’s lives, and connecting with people through this part of their identity was truly incredible. Each time the jazz band closed with Al Bint Al Shalabiya and the audience started grooving along, clapping along, or even singing along, wide smiles spreading into the sax solo leading into Bebop, there was a sense of “yeah, music matters here, music matters a lot”. That filled me with joy.

So yeah, back to the six words, I guess I had a lot of personal transformations in Jordan. I see things at home differently, I miss new things (Jordanian food), I love new things (Fairouz), and I feel like another part of the world is still stuck inside me somehow. Music lets me carry that around easily, I feel. That’s how this was musically empowering, I felt the power that music has to carry people across the globe (me) and unite people in listening and sometimes scare people and other times make people feel at home in midst of great chaos. This was not only empowering for the kids we were able to teach one on one and in groups (I hope), but also for me, to challenge the idea of “what can music do for people”. And yes, I did get to learn a lot about history on this trip too. But I learned to see how all these three are intertwined: our personal journeys and growth, the music we make as the reflections and sounds of that, and history as the lasting impressions we leave in a larger sense.